The healer mage-bandit had already removed the dagger from his arm and cast a Tier 5 healing spell on himself. The wound closed up as though it hadn't existed in the first place.
The arm looked almost as good as new if the blood that had earlier gushed out of his wound earlier was ignored. He did a number of maneuvers and stretches to make sure his arm was working alright.
Annabeth, who had been walking towards him, came to a stop a little distance away as though to give him a chance to finish. He turned to look at her, his face not hiding the fact that he was angry. He was filled with so much rage that the thought of his head exploding had crossed his mind several times now.
"They say love is blind but I didn't think it would be literally," Annabeth jokingly said with a smile.
"What the f*ck are you talking about?!" the healer mage-bandit sneered.
The other remaining bandit chuckled as though he got the joke.
"The uhh... the flash thing you did... it blinded me for a bit.... remember?" Annabeth said while looking at the chuckling bandit curiously.
The healer mage-bandit was getting more annoyed by the fact that everything seemed like a joke to her. He silently stared at her, leading to an uncomfortable silence for Annabeth.
"Awkward...." Annabeth said under her breath, before averting her eyes from the two bandits and whistling a made-up tune.
"You're funny," the other bandit finally said, he was amused by the strange girl.
He was a tall skinny man with brown long hair that he let cover part of his face, as though attempting to hide a hideous scar. He wore fairly clean clothes, which was quite remarkable considering that his coworkers in the bandit profession didn't quite clean up a lot. What was most intriguing though, was that he held a bamboo stick as his weapon.
"You're funny looking," Annabeth retorted with a smile, "You seem like quite the oddball."
"Says the 15-year-old killing machine and hopeless romantic," the bandit replied.
"16," Annabeth corrected, smiling flirtatiously at him.
"My name is Ujarak by the way," Ujarak introduced himself.
"I would tell you my name too, Ujarak, but you won't live long enough to use it so... call me babe," Annabeth provocatively replied with a smile.
"Hehehe. As I said, you're f-"
Before he could finish his sentence, Annabeth was running towards him trying to cover the distance between them. To her surprise, the bandit didn't seem like he was caught off guard and broadened his smile. He simply relaxed his shoulders and prepared to receive her attack.
Annabeth didn't understand why someone would bring a bamboo stick to a fight but she didn't really care. She threw a straight punch, but he ducked under her arm and hit her leg with the bamboo stick. Ujarak then tried to hit her leg again but she dived and rolled on the ground away from him.
"Had that stick been a sword, I would have lost my leg just now," she thought.
She massaged the area she had been hit while staring at the bamboo stick. She couldn't believe an ordinary bamboo would inflict this much pain. It felt like she had been hit with a metal pipe or something similar. She was right.
"It's an interesting thing isn't it?" Ujarak said when he noticed her staring at his weapon of choice.
"I'm what you might call a metal mage," he said, "I can enchant anything I touch to become a metal so it doesn't matter what weapon I use."
Metal was a special derivative of earth magic. It had the best defense as compared to the actual earth magic. The downside, however, was that metal mages could not use the natural field the earth provided.
Furthermore, most metal element mages preferred enchanting their bodies with metal for defense than enchanting objects to become metallic when metallic weapons and shields already existed.
Many metal element mages preferred to enchant their bodies to become metallic and then attack like that, or additionally buy a sword to attack with. Annabeth didn't quite get the whole point of enchanting a bamboo stick at all. Ujarak was definitely an oddball, she thought.
Annabeth knew this fight was going to be much harder than the one against the strength mage-bandit.
Metal mages possessed stronger bodies than strength mages no matter how one compared the two. Her opponent was quite nimble and skilled as far as she could tell from the small engagement she had with him.
To make matters worse, the healer mage-bandit was still around so any amount of damage she could deal might get healed by the healer. It seemed they also understood this and the healer stepped behind Ujarak.
"Chicken!" She shouted the healer bandit.
Annabeth knew how much healers tried, by all means, to avoid directly engaging their enemies. She planned to provoke him as much as she could to make him attack her. He seemed to be hotheaded and doing something stupid when provoked wouldn't be too out of character for him, she thought.
Her plan worked, just not how she thought it would go.
Both her opponents nodded to each other and simultaneously ran towards her. Annabeth could already guess that they would try to take her down with a coordinated attack.
If it was any other combination then maybe she would have stood her ground. With one causing a serious handicap while the other being skilled damage dealer, Annabeth decided to run from them while she thought of a plan.
She needed something that could at least take out one of them, especially Ujarak the damage dealer of the duo. It didn't even take 10 seconds of running around while racking her brain to come up with a plan. She increased her running pace to create some distance and then slowed down slightly to avoid messing up her spell conjuring.
By the time she was done, Ujarak and the healer mage had almost caught up to her. She looked over her shoulder to see their position, but her vision turned completely white again. The healer bandit had been waiting for her to turn around before launching his flash spell.
Annabeth knew she could not rely on her reflexes to dodge the combined attacks of the two bandits. She could not wait for her vision to return before releasing her spell on them, so she did the next best thing. She stopped running, directed her fingers at her feet and released her spell.
Ujarak was in the middle of an attack aimed at her head when he found himself orbiting around Annabeth.
The healer mage-bandit, who was two steps behind, was hit by the spinning mage and knocked away from the tornado. He was about to complain until he saw what his comrade was caught up in.
Ujarak was screaming at the top of his lungs after a fire ignited all around him. The flames grew to merge with the wind tornado, the two elements boosting each other.
The flames kept growing and the healer mage was forced to step back, fearing that he could be caught up in it. His hands were trembling as he had never seen a combination of fire and wind look so terrifying.
While the flame was spinning and burning the helpless Ujarak, it shifted a little from side to side like it was dancing. This was Annabeth's Tier 4 fusion spell 'Dancing Inferno', a combination of her primary wind element and her new primary element, fire.
Ujarak had suffered severe burns before the spell finally wore off but thanks to his body's natural defense due to the metal element, he survived.